Gavagai manages his personal GULAG

[spacetyrantxenu]

It looks fine on my monitor but most of the time I read the forum on my 7 inch tablet these days. The images fit ok but the text gets rendered down really small with large images using the [img] tag. With the screenshot tag I can click on the image to see detail and then click again to shrink it back down to make the text readable again.

[BRickAstley]

Some of us have work issued laptops and are too poor/cheap to get giant screened ones.

Plus being able to click on a screenshot to expand it lets you get the best of both worlds.

[Gavagai]

Work issued laptops should be used for buisness exclusively. Unless you are an NSA spy, tasked with monitoring our little community, you are breaching the trust of your employer.

(I'm just envious because I don't have a work issued laptop.)

[Gavagai]

The question I keep asking myself is whether this war was a mistake, objectively speaking. Because, seriously, I wasn't supposed to be able to take the capital. The logical outcome of this war is me taking Borzoi and Doberman and Grimace's capital stuffed with archers. To break it I would need to sacrifice HAs or build a bunch of swords, both things being extremely costly. In the alternative universe I take Borzoi and capital at something like T95 with HAs and minimal hammer expenses but Barteq potentially takes Doberman and creates a really unpleasant and unstable situation.
I think I still would take a world where I have Borzoi and Doberman and invincible capital. Archers can't really attack and Borzoi is useful even while pressured culturally.

[BRickAstley]

Work issued laptops should be used for buisness exclusively. Unless you are an NSA spy, tasked with monitoring our little community, you are breaching the trust of your employer.

(I'm just envious because I don't have a work issued laptop.)

I guess *issue* is too strong a term for the reality.... it's a 6 year old macbook pro they they had extra of in the stockroom, that I was given to use with free reign to do whatever with it, the closest thing to work related software on there is the VPN I use when i log in to my work desktop remotely.

[wetbandit]

The question I keep asking myself is whether this war was a mistake, objectively speaking.

Can you explain what you mean by mistake? That your success creates an unstable geopolitical situation? SOmething else? I'm baffled.

[Old Harry]

Perhaps that it would have been a mistake if grimace hadn't folded? Either Gavagai and Bacchus analyzed their neighbor well or they got lucky...

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Either Gavagai and Bacchus analyzed their neighbor well or they got lucky...

Or both? I'm also interested to hear more about this terrible problem of having more land so inexpensively. We should all have such good fortune!

Edit: Maybe this will explain my thinking...

[Gavagai]

The question I keep asking myself is whether this war was a mistake, objectively speaking.

Can you explain what you mean by mistake? That your success creates an unstable geopolitical situation? SOmething else? I'm baffled.

I mean that in a game where uncertainity is present it is never right to evaluate actions exclusively by their results. You may make a mistake but still succeed because of luck. Or vice versa. To give a real-life example: it is usually a bad idea to buy a business without due dilligence but if you do it and it turns out that the business is perfectly OK then you are better off because you saved money on lawyers and auditors. Still, even though you are better off, you've made a mistake because this isn't the result you could have reasonably predicted and you deserve to be fired (or set on fire depending on corporate policies and legal environment). Old Harry is correct here: I'm thinking if the war would be that successful if Grimace defended properly.

[wetbandit]

I mean that in a game where uncertainity is present it is never right to evaluate actions exclusively by their results. Old Harry is correct here: I'm thinking if the war would be that successful if Grimace defended properly.

I understand your statement better now. Of course the best analysis is to review your process rather than the results.

This early attack plan was Bacchus' idea:

So, I think HBR first is the way to go after all, but I also don't think we should wait until we have it for the attack. It looks like we can easily attack with 10 axes by T80 -- this let's us take Borzoi and cut his copper. We should then follow up with the HA stack, and we won't need 16, 10 will do the job. Even if he goes "full military" after out axe attack, the damage we will do by cutting the metal, the roads to capital and the harassment of workers is greater.

We don't have access to the chats you two presumably had debating the merits of attacking on Bacchus' plan or your later HA plan (or at least I missed them here). That being the case, I don't know the underlying assumptions you relied upon in choosing the plan you did. I would guess, having read your threads and knowing how deeply you analyze differing strategies, that an evaluation of the defending player's ability would factor into your discussion on choosing the Axe plan or the HA plan. Whatever you chose, you know best whether that was sufficient justification. Bacchus could weigh in too.

In any event, the success you've achieved was a possibility in choosing the Axe plan, and this particular result may be the best possible outcome of any war against Grimace. But I am not certain how likely this result would have been (5-25%?). You seem to be as well. Even a low percentage of this chance of success though may have justified the seemingly greater risk. But the added certainty and ease of conquest, independent of Grimace's actions, under the HA plan, could have been equally illusory with a few more spears over 10-15 more turns to prep. But I don't know what you talked about, you could have been imagining Bacchus in another dream.

Congrats on the victories so far. And it is better to be lucky than good.